Users should never be able to do things that cause crashes in the same way that drivers should not ever be able to press any button or press any pedal that causes the engine to spontaneously burst into flames.

I'm also a Mac user, but let's not boast here, shall we?

My personal guess would have been at least 10x. Did Microsoft bribe the study authors?

Dude, are you living under a rock?

These bands are creating new music. But the money that allows them to do so comes from their old music. I have bands in my collection that have been making music for 30 years.

No they don't. They don't even make ok money. Tours are expensive and a lot of people, from road crew to venue security, take their cut before the musicians. The big guys, they make a killing on tours. But the small ones sometimes don't even break even.

In fact, a common wisdom in the industry is that touring is worth it not because the tour itself makes profits, but because it builds a fanbase and drives what is called "catalog discovery" - both old and new fans looking buying the albums with the songs they liked (and for the old fans, didn't know).

This study: https://www.giarts.org/article... says that 28% of income across all the musicians surveyed comes from tours. The share is larger for the rock/pop sector where it nears 40% but even that isn't easy money. And if you consider that only 20% of the rock/pop musicians make more than $50,000 a year, then it becomes a hollow statement.

Plus, it goes directly against your first statement - while on tour the band is not creating new music. So if you want to drive musicians more towards constantly creating (which most of them already do), then you can't make live performances the main income source.

As much as I like to bash on Windows as the next guy/gal I gotta say since Windows 7 service pack 1 crashes in Windows had become nearly non-existent for me. My oldest son has been running Windows 10 for over 5 years with no crashes to speak of. My younger son has been using Windows 11 for a few years and his crashes have always been due to faulty updates from Microsoft. Windows got pretty stable around 2011 (minus the faulty update crashes as mentioned). I still maintain a Windows 7 box in the house for old software I need. That darn thing has been rock solid for over 15 years now.

In what way? Once the model is loaded into VRAM, very little data has to travel over the bus. You're going to be limited by storage speeds loading the model anyway.

Assuming it's remotely true (and there's good reason for thinking it isn't), it still means the FBI director was negligent in their choice of personal email provider, that the email provider had incompetent security, and that the government's failure to either have an Internet Czar (the post exists) or to enforce high standards on Internet services are a threat to the security of the nation (since we already know malware can cross airgaps through negligence, the DoD has been hit that way a few times). The FBI director could have copied unknown quantities of malware onto government machines through lax standards, any of which could have delivered classified information over the Internet (we know this because it has also happened to the DoD).

In short, the existence of the hack is a minor concern relative to every single implication that hack has.

Extremely unsafe reputationally, and extremely dubious in terms of profits.

Especially for an administration who's priority is to eliminate pornography as an evil to society and why the US isn't having more babies and getting divorced way too often.

It's in the book. Everything Trump has done has followed Project 2025 (and now Project 2026) book. Getting rid of pornographic materials is pretty much the first chapter.

There is more than one study and more than one way to look at it. Especially for streaming, having a catalog matters, especially for the smaller artists who will never have a charts-level hit:

"In 2024, nearly 1,500 artists generated over $1 million in royalties from Spotify aloneâ"likely translating to over $4 million across all recorded revenue sources. What's remarkable is that 80% of these million-dollar earners didn't have a single song reach the Spotify Global Daily Top 50 chart. This reveals a fundamental shift from hit-driven success to sustainable catalog-based income, where consistent engagement from devoted audiences matters more than viral moments or radio dominance."

https://cord-cutters.gadgethac...

Also don't forget that many studies such as DiCola's "Money from Music" focus on the superstars and the big hits. That is true, the charts pop music generates 80% or so of its income within the few weeks it stays in the charts and then drops of sharply.

Honestly, I don't care about the charts and superstars. They wouldn't starve if we cut copyright terms to six weeks. I do care about the indie artists that I enjoy. Who after ten years get the band back together for another tour through clubs with 200 or 500 people capacity. I'm fairly sure they would suffer if the revenue from those albums disappeared. And disappear it would. Maybe fans would still buy the CDs from the merch booth, but Spotify would certainly not pay them if it didn't have to.

You're probably not going to get any external PCIe port other than thunderbolt. Thunderbolt is fast enough for most Mac use cases anyway. TB5 gets you 80 Gbps bidirectional, or 120/40 Gbps asymmetrical, and there aren't a lot of things in a desktop environment that would really benefit from more than 120 Gbps.

A tangent on another historian of science and technology I enjoyed taking a course from and who wrote about information technology and who died relatively way too young:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
        "James Ralph Beniger (December 16, 1946 -- April 12, 2010) was an American historian and sociologist and Professor of Communications and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, particularly known for his early work on the history of quantitative graphics in statistics, and his later work on the technological and economic origins of the information society."

RIP Jim. Thanks for being an excellent -- and kind -- professor. And mentioning me and other students with thanks in your Control Revolution book.

And thanks also introducing me to the 1978 book "Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought" by Langdon Winner --- which just gets more relevant every day.
https://www.amazon.com/Autonom...
        "This study of the idea of technology out of control makes an important contribution to our understanding of the problems of civilization. The basic argument is not that some persons or groups promote technology against the public interest (true though that is), or even that our technology develops in its own way in spite of all our efforts to control it (also true in some respects). Rather, Winner is concerned with a more subtle effect: the artifacts that we have invented to satisfy our material wants have now developed, in size and complexity, to the point of delimiting or even determining our conception of the wants themselves. In that way, we as a civilization are losing mastery over our own tools.... 'As a source for readings and reflections on this problem, the book is rich and rewarding.... If it has a practical lesson, it is that of awareness: only by recognizing the boundaries of our socially constructed scientific-technological reality can we transcend them in imagination and then achieve effective human action.'"

Winner's book is perhaps a sort of antithesis of "The Soul of A New Machine"? In that sometimes technologists (I'm looking at your OpenAI and cohorts) can get so excited about problem solving and miss the big picture. Related humor:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes...
        "This reminds me of the engineer who is condemned to death, but as his turn approaches they find that the mechanism on the electric chair is no longer functioning. About to send everyone home, the engineer calls out "Wait! I think i can see the problem!""

I heard that Winner did not get tenure at MIT essentially because he suggested that the method of education used there was essentially blinding the MIT students to the social implications of what they were doing. A related book:
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
        "Who are you going to be? That is the question.
        In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
        The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
        Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."

Anyway, I am so thankful for people like Jim Beniger, Langdon Winner, Michael Mahoney, and others who provided a larger perspective to technologists on what they were doing.

If I can find fault with "The Soul of a New Machine" from hazy recollections from 40+ years ago I don't think it did that. It's still informative though on how technology -- like now AI development -- can become addictive for techies with both good and bad aspects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
      "The book follows many of the designers as they give almost every waking moment of their lives to design and debug the new machine."

It's maybe kind of like the difference between books that glorify warmaking and "winning" versus those that glorify peacemaking and "win/win/win"?

An example of the latter is "To Become a Human Being: The Message of Tadodaho Chief Leon Shenandoah".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Or an essay by Terry Dobson on Aikido:
https://livingthepresentmoment...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
      "My teacher taught us each morning that the art was devoted to peace. "Aikido," he said again and again, "is the art of reconciliation. Whoever has the mind to fight has broken his connection with the universe. If you try to dominate other people, you are already defeated. We study how to resolve conflict, not how to start it." ..."

Or in a way Theodore Sturgeon's "The Skills of Xanadu" 1956 short story about wearable networked mobile computing for sharing knowledge that inspired Ted Nelson to invent hypertext which contributed to the creation of the web.

Or Alfie Kohn's "No Contest: The Case Against Competition":
https://www.alfiekohn.org/cont...

One of the most interesting things I overheard at lunch at IBM Research was something along the lines of "We hire the top people from the most competitive schools -- and then wonder why they can't get along and cooperate."

And I'd add, wonder why many technologists rarely take much time to think about the broader social implications of what they are doing.

And "Soul of a New Machine" -- from what I can remember of it -- exemplifies and celebrates that focused mindset.

I can thank someone (maybe Bruce Maier?) who posted this essay to the Lyrics TOPS-10 timesharing system I used in high school circa 1980 -- for helping me have some reservations about such narrow focus:
"The Hacker Papers [about some Stanford CS students]"
https://cdn.preterhuman.net/te...
      "As much as an essay, this is a story. It is a true story of people paying $9,000 a year to lose elements of their humanity. It is a story of the breaking of wills and of people. It is a story of addictions, and of misplaced values. In a large part, it is my own story. ..."

Also assigned reading in Michael Mahoney's course on the history of science and technology at Princeton circa 1984. Although I had read it already -- and found it inspiring.

RIP Tracy Kidder.

And also RIP Professor Mahoney who died in 2008 at the relatively young age of 69 -- just when a historian is typically getting very productive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://www.dailyprincetonian....

"Histories of Computing"
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/bo...
"Computer technology is pervasive in the modern world, its role ever more important as it becomes embedded in a myriad of physical systems and disciplinary ways of thinking. The late Michael Sean Mahoney was a pioneer scholar of the history of computing, one of the first established historians of science to take seriously the challenges and opportunities posed by information technology to our understanding of the twentieth century."

It's going to be a rough next decade with ongoing loss of pioneers of personal computing and those who wrote about them or who inspired them. People like Steve Jobs and Doug Engelbart and Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon who have passed on years ago. Glad that Steve Wozniak and Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls and so on are still hanging in there! A heartfelt thanks to all of them for giving us possibilities -- even if we may not be doing great things with them right now.

"Original architects [Wozniak] of the personal computer hate what it's become..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"Steve Wozniak says he's "disappointed a lot" by AI and rarely uses it"
https://www.techspot.com/news/...

"designed to respect consumer choice and privacy, with data used in aggregated, permissioned, and compliant ways"

I used to work IT as a civilian at a police department, and whenever I had to go out to the training academy I always spent time at the armory (for fun and to blow off time before going back to my office). One day I go in and there's a couple of boxes of donuts on one of the work tables, and the sergeant tells me to help myself. I ask him why the donuts and he explains that if someone ever uses the word clip when they're supposed to use magazines, people are supposed to shout out "DONUTS!", and that person has to bring in donuts the next day.

The IT office that I worked in I was the only civvie with three officers, current and retired. We were talking about guns one day and Bruce mentioned a clip. Me and Bob (detective) immediately shouted out "DONUTS!" and Bruce looked confused while we laughed. We then explained, and he was a good sport and brought in donuts the next day.

Even without the warhead, it'd leave a heckuva mark.

Touché! Good point on "actually" and whether it is qualified, thanks. I guess that word only fits in relation to there actually being a novel which I was referring to? But I agree I should have worded that better. The word "fictionally" might have been a better choice? Glad your comment sparked some tangential discussion by others.